Department/Area
Wyss Institute - Harvard Medical School Position Description
About the Wyss:
The Wyss Institute’s mission is to transform healthcare and the environment by emulating the way nature builds. We harness the imagination of academia and the focus of industry to translate ground-breaking technologies into commercial products that solve big problems. We support research that universities, companies, and venture capital firms don’t fund because they view it as too risky. We prefer to use the word “challenging,” and we love challenges. For more information, , , or .
About this Role: The Wyss Institute invites applications for Wyss Translational Artificial Intelligence Fellowships in Biologically Inspired Engineering.
In this role, Fellows will be supporting the mission of the Wyss Translational AI Catalyst to foster a collaborative community of innovators dedicated to the intersection of Artificial Intelligence , biology, and healthcare. This Fellowship is designed for researchers with deep expertise in AI/ML who are motivated to move beyond benchmark-driven modeling and into biologically grounded, experimentally validated, and translationally impactful work. Fellows will operate at the intersection of AI, rich multi-omics data, and human-relevant disease models, working closely with experimental scientists, clinicians, and industry partners to accelerate discovery and enable real world application. Fellows will gain hands-on exposure to translational science, drug discovery, and technology development, with opportunities to contribute to intellectual property, partnerships, and new venture creation.
The Translational Artificial Intelligence Fellows will be working across the Institute and co-mentored by members of the Institute Faculty and Translational AI Team. Fellows are selected on the basis of their academic achievement and/or postdoctoral experience in AI/ML field. These Fellowships are intended for scientists of great promise with outstanding technical expertise who have completed their doctoral degree within the last two years.
The Institute will provide the TAIF with an annual stipend of $93,933. The TAIF will also be able to access all of the Platforms, facilities, equipment and staff of the Institute at no cost for their Institute-related research and development activities. Fellowships are awarded annually for up to 3 years.
Although Translational Artificial Intelligence Fellows will be granted more independence than traditional postdoctoral positions, each Fellow is mentored by an Institute Core Faculty and a member of the Translational AI Team. This mentorship structure is designed to support both scientific independence and translational success.
Mentors are expected to: - Integrate the Fellow into active research and development efforts at the Wyss Institute, including Enabling Technology Platforms and application-focused translational projects.
- Provide guidance across key dimensions of career development, including research in science and engineering, technology development, intellectual property and translational strategy, written and oral communications, and preparation of competitive grant proposals for government agencies and industrial sponsors.
- Ensure full institutional integration, including inclusion on academic departmental rosters, access to appropriate facilities and platforms, and completion of required safety and compliance training at the Institute and affiliated academic departments.
What you’ll do: - Designing, developing, and deploying modern AI/ML models—including deep learning, foundation models, multimodal architectures, and generative approaches—to analyze complex biological and biomedical datasets generated at the Wyss Institute and with external partners.
- Integrating and modeling multi-omics data, such as proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, transcriptomics, spatial biology, and associated metadata, often across time, dose, or perturbation conditions, to enable phenotype-driven prediction and insight.
- Developing AI models to address translational questions, including but not limited to drug efficacy and safety prediction, mechanism-of-action inference, biomarker discovery, causal or network-based modeling of biological systems, and drug repurposing or design.
- Working in close, iterative collaboration with experimental scientists, clinicians, and platform teams to refine hypotheses, guide experimental design, and validate AI predictions using human-relevant disease models .
- Engaging with the broader Wyss Translational AI ecosystem, including participation in and leadership of seminars, working groups, and collaborative initiatives that connect AI researchers, biologists, engineers, and clinicians.
- Contributing to technology translation and entrepreneurship, including interactions with industry partners, participation in translational strategy discussions, and potential involvement in intellectual property development, startup formation, or partnered research programs